ANNIVERSARY THE TRUE AND ONLY LASCH on the true and only heaven, 25 years later Susan McWilliams T rying to remember the year 1991, the year Christopher Lasch wrote The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, can be like trying to conjure a foreign country. Back then there were no tablets or e-books or smartphones. There was no Facebook and no Amazon and no Twitter and no Google. Only a handful of geeks and government agents had even heard the word Internet. In 1991 the revolution that had Americans talking wasn't digital-it was Russian, with the last days of the Cold War passing more in whimpers than bangs as an attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev destabilized and eventually dissolved the Soviet Union. There was a war in Iraq, but it was quick and decisive. There were wars against terrorists being fought around the globe, but there was no War on Terror. And there was nobody in the United States who seemed particularly concerned about the possibility of mass-murderous attacks on American soil. Susan McWilliams is associate professor of politics at Pomona College and the author of Traveling Back: Toward a Global Political Theory. moder nagejour nal .com 15http://www.modernagejournal.com